Games

My wife and I have this game we play sometimes (no, not the one with the jelly doughnuts) where one of us will say something completely out of character, and the other will say 'Who are you, and what have you done with my wife/husband?' The other day, we inadvertently played it for real.

I was musing over the Great Television Thing, back when we were contemplating buying a plasma screen TV (before becoming a little wiser to the intricacies of HDTV; think we'll wait about two years more). It got me thinking about how I'd like to upgrade the stereo system downstairs (which likely dates me; I guess the current phrase is 'the audio system', though perhaps that's out of vogue, too), which led me to thinking about electronics generally, at which point I turned to her and casually suggested that we get another laptop computer, because having the one has worked out so well in terms of easing congestion. At which point she turned to me and gave the word, and I realized how very odd it was for me to offer to spend about a thousand dollars almost on a whim.

I offer as defense that I'd been thinking in rarefied zones while contemplating the cost of the HDTVs, so that my normal standards had gotten a bit out of whack. For about a week, a good salesman at Circuit City (their motto: Don't You Wish Our Stores Were As Good As Our Ads?) could have pushed me into buying the TV, but I got over it. I'm not breathing helium any more.

Unlike Ben Stein. I like him -- you may know him (I was about to refer to him by his initials, but that would be rude) as the guy on Win Ben Stein's Money, as well as a character actor and the guy who looks glumly at you through the Visine ads. He's a surprisingly bright guy (as distinct from one who just sounds bright with the right script) as can be seen in his occasional economics articles in the New York Times. But there are some issues where I think he's breathing helium, as in the current edition of the paper where he asks why people dislike large oil companies making tons of money. You can understand why he would dislike that attitude, being a Republican big-business sort of fellow, but in fact he really does seem to get it in many ways, and in that same column weighed in heavily against the huge endowment of his college, wondering why they still asked for money, and the huge personal profits that some CEOs now make for no corporate gains at all (not to mention, corporate losses). He sounds right. And then he says something like this:

"I can tell you, since I am close friends with a man who wrote speeches for a top executive, that they are not wildly well paid, particularly by Wall Street or Hollywood standards. Out of the 85,000 (employees of Exxon Mobil), only a few earn more than a million dollars in salary a year, which is training-wheels pay for investment banks or big Hollywood talent agencies."

Note the 'in salary a year'. So if I earn some number south of that, but earn a number north of it due to bonuses and stock options, I'm morally pure? And then there's 'more than a million'. Gosh, I'd have put the bar way lower. And finally, the comparison to Hollywood or investment banks (both not known for simplicity of life style and lack of self - aggrandizement). It must be like saying Well, sure, Katrina did do some damage to New Orleans, but its not like the whole damn ocean poured in there!

Maybe I should have used his initials.